University of Colorado, Boulder CU Scholar Series in Anthropology Anthropology 6-1963 No. 8: Introduction to the Earl Morris Papers Joe Ben Wheat University of Colorado, Boulder Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.colorado.edu/santhro Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Wheat, Joe Ben, "No. 8: Introduction to the Earl Morris Papers" (1963). Series in Anthropology. 18. http://scholar.colorado.edu/santhro/18 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Anthropology at CU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Series in Anthropology by an authorized administrator of CU Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BASKET MAKER III SITES NEAR DURANGO, COLORADO BY ROY L. CARLSON R e s e a r c h A ss o c ia t e in A nthropology U n iv e r s it y of C o l o r a d o M u s e u m w it h INTRODUCTION TO THE EARL MORRIS PAPERS BY JOE BEN WHEAT C u r a t o r of A nthropology U n iv e r s it y of C o l o r a d o M u s e u m U n iver sity of C olorado P ress Series in Anthropology, No. 8 The Earl Morris Papers, No. I University of Colorado Press Boulder, Colorado, June, 1963 Price $3.50 INTRODUCTION TO THE EARL MORRIS PAPERS For nearly half a century Earl H. Morris was one of the nation’s leading archaelogists. He shared in, and was instrumental to, the development of both Middle American and Southwestern archaeology. But it was the Southwest that really absorbed Morris’s interest and love, and to the Southwest he re­ turned again and again. Many of the basic concepts of Southwestern Archae­ ology owe their existence or development to him. (Morris 1917, 1919a, 1921a, 1927, 1936.) Morris was a man of many-faced genius; yet, he remained, all his life, dedicated to field work. He loved to be actively, physically engaged in the process of baring our archaeological heritage of the encumbering earth of the past. Earl Morris dug out his first pottery vessel when he was three years old. It is perhaps characteristic that this vessel, a dipper with a broken handle, remained in Morris’s collection until his death. His childhood and youth were spent at Farmington, New Mexico, where he was rarely out of sight of some prehistoric ruin. The interest fostered by his parents became both an avocation and a profession. (Morris, n. d., Introduction to Catalogue of E. H. Morris Collection.) The year 1913 saw the beginning of Morris’s long and fruitful association with the University of Colorado Museum. In this year and the next, he ex­ cavated a series of sites in Southwestern Colorado: Lion and Johnson can­ yons, ruins on the Salt Canyon-Grass Canyon Divide, Red Mesa, Red Horse Gulch, and Long Hollow (Morris 1919b) as well as a site near Aztec Ruin (Morris 1915), and another near Farmington, New Mexico. In 1915 Morris began his long series of excavations in the ruins of the La Plata district. During a part of each field season of 1916, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1929, and 1930, he returned to the La Plata. Most of this work was financed by the Carnegie Institution and the collections deposited in the Uni­ versity of Colorado Museum. These investigations culminated in the mag­ nificent La Plata Report (Morris 1939) published by Carnegie Institution. Morris was never one to be content with one field season a year. In addi­ tion to beginning the La Plata work in 1915, he also carried out extensive ex­ cavations in the Gobernador area and less intensive ones in the Upper Rio Grande Valley. Reports have never been published. During World War I and the immediately following years, Morris was directing the excavations of the vast Aztec Ruin for the American Museum of Natural History. Part of this work has been published (Morris 1919b, 1921b, 1924, 1928), but much remains to be done. iii iv UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES In 1924, Morris, on leave from the Carnegie Institution, whose staff he had then joined, excavated several sites in Canyon del Muerto for the University of Colorado Museum. The following year, again on leave, Morris excavated in a series of sites along the Shiprock-Gallup highway for the Museum. He had previously excavated in this area for the American Museum. None of these excavations have been reported in detail, although brief and passing use has been made of the data (Morris 1938, 1939, 1941; Morris and Burgh 1941). In 1926 Morris dug in the Mimbres Valley where he salvaged material from seven Classic Mimbres ruins; in 1928 he dug a number of burials at the late prehistoric Hopi site of Kawaikuh. Published reports were never made on either of these excavations. In 1931 Morris was instrumental in having his long-time field foreman, Oscar Tatman, carry on excavations at a large ruin near Solomonsville, Arizona. Like several others, the results of this excavation were never pub­ lished. When the long task of writing the La Plata Report was finished, Morris again returned to the field for the Carnegie Institution, this time to excavate the Basket Maker II and III sites near Durango, Colorado. The earlier sites have been published (Morris and Burgh 1954), but a report on the later sites was never completed. When Morris wrote or spoke about archaeology, it was in polished, per­ fectionist phrases. He felt the weight and responsibility of his utterances. Writing was to Morris as it is to most of us, a difficult thing to buckle down to, for inevitably there was the lure of the trowel and shovel. Nevertheless, when Earl Morris died suddenly on June 24, 1956, he left a monumental legacy of published reports. He also left an extensive legacy of collections, which have not been analyzed and described, in various museums in the United States. Some of Morris’s earliest field work was carried out for the then infant Uni­ versity of Colorado Museum. Through the years, and through various cir­ cumstances, Morris’s work continued to embellish these collections. The University of Colorado Museum became the repository for most of the ma­ terial from work in the Southwest carried out by Morris for the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Not only did these collections enrich the hold­ ings of the Museum, but, being gathered together in one place, they afforded a vast reservoir of data pertinent to Southwestern Archaeology. It has long been our desire to make this resource available to the archaeological public. Most museums which have been in operation for any considerable period of time have accumulated collections which have never been published upon in any complete or satisfactory fashion. Some of these inevitably have no associative data; but many major collections, made by competent archae- INTRODUCTION TO THE EARL MORRIS PAPERS V ologists and fully documented, remain buried because of this lack of publica­ tion. Such collections often are known to a few archaeologists by reputation, even by footnote or brief-reference type of publication; but by and large, they remain just as buried and unknown as if they had never been excavated. If the not inconsiderable cost of excavation, storage, and curation is ever to be justified, then these collections must be assiduously re-excavated from the museums and placed on record. From the point of view of knowledge, this is even more important, for much of this material could not be duplicated today. Furthermore, so long as they remain buried in the obscurity of museum storage, we, as archaeologists, are denied knowledge which may be necessary to the adequate solution of many of the problems of prehistory. It is, of course, true that many of the questions we like to ask of our excava­ tions and collections today cannot be answered from the collections and records made in earlier days. But many can, and it is no real excuse to say that publication of these older materials is not justified on this basis. In fact, such publication must often eliminate some questions, and in any event will help to focus our contemporary inquiries and to add breadth to the answers we reach. Many museums dream of the day when an adequately prepared graduate student will come along and be induced to undertake the preparation of a report on one of these lost excavations. Occasionally one does, and such a report as Haury’s Los Muertos appears; but for every satisfactory report there are masses of material that are not, and perhaps never will be, prepared for publication if we must wait for that graduate student. Most museum cura­ tors cannot, or do not, take on the responsibility of writing reports on these collections. For one thing, most have their hands full with other duties, even if they were competent to undertake the necessary analysis and research to bring to fruition such long-fallow projects. Thus, for inertia and lack of time, of funds, or of personnel and that elusive graduate student, most lost and buried collections remain lost and buried. At the University of Colorado Museum we had reluctantly reached the con­ clusion that adequate reporting of the Museum’s extensive unpublished Earl H. Morris collections probably could not be achieved within the normal course of our affairs; hence, we began to search for some way to implement our desire to publish on the collections in our custody. At this point, the oppor­ tunity arose to secure the services of Earl Morris’s daughter, Dr.